


Guilt

by Avelera



Series: After Uprising [8]
Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Hermann Gottlieb, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-04
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-07-31 10:27:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20113606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avelera/pseuds/Avelera
Summary: Years after the Tokyo attacks, Newt still wrestles with whether he can be forgiven.





	Guilt

**Author's Note:**

> Yet another "drabble" prompt that got away from me. 
> 
> An Anon requested: Newt struggling with the fact that Hermann saved him and the world and he loves him but he knows he's nowhere close to forgiveness even if maybe he feels guilty about that. And Hermann doesn't love the situation but he gets it.
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

Hermann woke in the middle of the night to an empty bed and the murmur of the television coming from the living room. It was still dark, and the bedside clock read close to four in the morning.

He considered going back to sleep, Newton was an all-hours person during their years in the lab, staying awake for days on end only to crash for a few hours on the lab couch then get right back up again around midnight for another experiment. If anything, Hermann should be heartened at this return to normalcy, after everything Newton had been through.

But the sound from the television was subdued, not the intermittent shouts and excited babble of anime or the cultured drawl of a nature documentary, Newton's go-to favorites when insomnia struck. Something felt off, and before Hermann could think better of it, he was fetching his cane from where it leaned against the wall beside his bed and his dressing gown from the hook on the door.

Sure enough, it was the news. Newton was hunched over on their couch, elbows on his knees, one hand pressed to his mouth. The flickering light of the television glinted in his eyes. His face looked oddly naked, exposed and vulnerable without his glasses. It had been years since he’d worn them now, but the sight still caught Hermann off guard.

It did not take long for Hermann to realize the topic of the broadcast. Tokyo. A memorial service, and after a quick calculation in his head, his stomach dropped as he realized the only thing it could be: today was the anniversary of the attack.

“Yeah, yeah, you don’t need to say it. I’ll turn it down,” Newt muttered into his hand and reached for the remote on the armrest beside him.

Hermann put a hand over Newt’s, stopping him, and rounded the couch, stepping between Newton and the television. Newt glanced up in surprise.

“Newton, you don’t have to watch this,” Hermann said. Newt’s lips thinned to a stubborn line. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Newt shifted over an inch, directing his hardened gaze around Hermann and back to the screen. “I think after everything that happened, _Herms_, the least I can do is pay my goddamn respects.”

“You’re wallowing.”

Newt’s back stiffened and his head jerked up. “And what makes you such an expert?”

Hermann raised an eyebrow and stepped out of Newt’s view to take a seat next to him. His cane he held before him, clasped between both hands. “Go on then.”

“Dude, just go back to sleep, you don’t have to stick around for this.”

“I lost friends that day too, Newton,” Hermann said placidly and turned his attention to the screen.

Tokyo was thirteen hours ahead of Boston, so at four in the morning, the afternoon ceremony was beginning to wind down. There was a sea of mourners dressed in black, dotted with PPDC dress uniforms. Hermann recognized the families of the cadets and Mr. Becket among the guests of honor.

Tokyo was a well-defended city, with myriad defenses against Kaiju attacks and a population fully prepared to run for the shelters. Yet even with such defenses in place, thousands had died that day, those unable to reach the underground bunkers in time, or trapped within them when the immeasurable weight of the Mega Kaiju crashed through defenses intended for Categories 4 and smaller.

The cost to the city’s infrastructure alone was astronomical. Years later, there was still rubble to clear and it would be years more before the city’s infrastructure was fully restored. Lives changed, lives ended that day, as Earth was dragged back into a nightmare they thought they’d escaped ten years before.

There was a soft sound beside him and out of the corner of his eye he saw Newton’s shoulders shiver, the light of the television reflected on the tear tracks staining his cheeks. A memorial video of the destruction played. There was, mercifully, no mention of Newton, nor would there be. The few images of him captured that day were grainy and from a distance. His role in the attack was classified, a secret closely guarded by the PPDC in the run-up to the invasion, lest some lunatic with Kaiju sympathies attempt to replicate the process and connect willingly to the Anteverse.

It was secrecy that had no doubt spared Newton’s life, if not, it seemed, his peace of mind.

The ceremony drew to a close. The news channel switched back to the regularly scheduled broadcast, and outside the darkness of night began to fade towards a washed-out dawn.

“You should have let Liwen shoot me,” Newt rasped.

Hermann sighed and hung his head. “Newton, we’ve discussed this.”

“Hey, I didn’t say kill.” Newt shot Hermann a sullen glower. His eyes were red-rimmed. “Just… I dunno, let her take me down, shoot the kneecaps, whatever. There’s a bunch of hospitals in Shanghai. I would have been fine. Probably.”

Hermann huffed a sigh. “Shooting you wouldn’t have stopped anything. The Kaiju were already halfway there. At most such an action _might_ have prevented the Mega Kaiju...”

“_At most?” _Newt said incredulously.“Hundreds of more people would still be alive if those Kaiju hadn't formed nightmare-Voltron and you say _at most?"_

“The right time to stop the Precursor plan was _years_ ago. All the signs were there, had the PPDC only read them, instead of resting so _comfortably_ on our laurels. You were a victim as much as anyone that day. ”

“Yeah, sure. Except I’m _still alive_ and they aren’t,” Newt jammed a finger at the darkened screen. “_I _got to have a life and a…a fucking _therapist_, and _you_ and no one even knows and no one even _blames me?_”

“That’s survivor’s guilt talking, Newton. Life is not always fair, we can only make the best of what is left to us.”

“By _lying_ to the world about what happened that day!”

“And what good would that do, people knowing?” Hermann snapped. A shudder of horror went through him at the thought. The hatred that would have been leveled at Newton, the death threats. Looking over their shoulder every day for fear of some lunatic with a gun and a misdirected grudge, for those who could not _possibly_ understand the complexities of the Precursor’s carefully laid assault on their world, in which Newton was merely one cog in a meticulously crafted machine.

Hermann had nearly destroyed himself, destroyed his reputation, his career, ensuring that Newton was treated as a prisoner of war and not a criminal after his capture, and that had been a near thing. The PPDC had the man strapped to a bloody _chair_ when Hermann finally located him after the attacks. “What do they know of the Anteverse or the Drift? You would have a _military tribunal_ decide if you were responsible for being held hostage by a hostile alien race? What would that _accomplish?_”

“At least people would _know!_” Newt exploded. “At least they wouldn’t ask what I’ve been _up to_ after Shao! You know most people thought I was in _rehab?_ Or on some secret mission for the PPDC, that’s the best one! I get emails from old Shao execs, asking if I’ve got some new _invention_ coming out like the Geiszler Array or a fucking _startup_ they can invest in! They think it’s a stupid conspiracy theory that the Kaiju expert at Shao Industries just _happened_ to go missing the same day that fucking _Kaiju brains_ started showing up in _evil Shao Jaegers!_”

Newt buried his face in his hands, muffling his words. “They still think I’m a goddamn hero and there are a thousand people _dead_ in Tokyo because I jacked the Precursors straight into my fucking skull.”

“And there are seven _billion_ still alive because you did!”

Newt’s shoulders sank and he let his hands drop as he leveled a glare at Hermann. “Because _you_ did. That Drift would have fried me like an egg if I’d gone in alone the second time, and you could kiss Stacker’s precious intel goodbye.”

Hermann rolled his eyes. “Now you’re just being absurd. You can’t put _every_ terrible outcome of that day on yourself and _every_ success onto others.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I want to be _absurd_, did you ever think of that?”

“As if I have the power to stop you.” Hermann glanced over and let a faint smile show through, in the hopes that it was a comforting one. Newton said nothing but at least there was no angry retort and Hermann took that as an opening to scoot closer. “What is this really about, Newton?”

Newt was silent for a long moment, his lips drawn to a tight line, then he shook his head. His voice cracked as he whispered, “You’re always so fucking certain it wasn’t me.”

Hermann’s insides went cold. There’d been a moment, the split second between what appeared to be Newton announcing its plan to destroy the world and their slip, that tiny slip when the Precursors dropped the facade. He could never be fully certain if it was deliberate when they referred to Newton as “he” at that moment. Were they taunting Hermann? Was it a mistake? Or were they simply past caring, so certain of their victory that it didn’t matter if one tiny, irrelevant lifeform on a doomed planet knew that it was their doing, and not that Newton had turned against his own world in a storm of resentment and rage?

“I am,” Hermann murmured. “… I have to be.”

“Or what?” Newt rasped. “What if I’m just a good liar? What if the Precursors were just an excuse and it was me the whole time, ever think of that? That I was just _manipulating_ you because I knew you were a sad sack with no friends and a crush on your old lab partner?”

“Then you’d be quite the actor indeed,” Hermann said tonelessly.

“Maybe I am! I tricked Liwen Shao, one of the smartest women in the world, for ten fucking years. _No one_ saw it coming. I was right in the middle of it all, the only guy with access to _everything_ it would take to build a weapon like Obsidian Fury, billions of dollars and a team of the best engineers in the world that jumped when I snapped my fingers and no one, not a single fucking person, not even you, figured it out until the last fucking second. So yeah, maybe I am a pretty good actor. And all I needed to do after was let it slip that I was being _controlled_, that I wasn’t _myself_ and gullible saps like you would throw themselves in front of bullets to make sure I made it to my rendezvous in Tokyo.”

“And when they spoke through you, when they distorted your voice?” Hermann challenged. “Do tell how you accomplished such a clever trick.”

“Hidden microphone,” Newt retorted.

“And the perfect Mandarin you suddenly acquired?”

“Pre-recorded.”

“How prescient of you,” Hermann said dryly. “My, you must have known Liwen _very_ well to have anticipated exactly what she would say and how to respond.”

“First rule of any fraud, buddy, never assume the other guy won’t spend more time and effort than you would to pull it off,” Newt said. “Maybe I just wanted to watch the world burn. Maybe I’m lying low now until my next chance and you’re the chump I picked to get me there.”

“Which is why you’re explaining your diabolical plan to me now, I assume?” Hermann said. “Would it not have been wiser to play your cards a little closer to the chest?”

“Hey, every supervillain craves an audience,” Newt said. He hunched his shoulders and looked down at his hands.

“Newton.”

“Well, it could be true, you don’t know.”

“Except that I do,” Hermann said.

“Why, because I’m a _good man?_” Newt spat.

“Yes,” Hermann said simply. “Even when you were a wretched plague on my existence, I never once doubted that we were all fighting for the same cause, no matter how unconventional your methods…”

“Maybe I was just biding my time…”

“Or how annoying your habits, or how idiotic your experiments, or how disagreeable your presence…”

“Hey!” 

Hermann raised an eyebrow then gave a deliberately exasperated sigh. “Trust me, Newton, I had many years to put together as low an opinion of you as it is possible to have. Had there been any reason to fire you, not the least of which was secret ambitions to end the world—and might I add all you would have had to do to accomplish such a goal in 2025 was _nothing_—I would have gleefully embraced the opportunity and escorted you from the Shatterdome myself with a complimentary kick to the seat of your trousers.”

Newt snorted, apparently despite himself, as he looked as if he were trying to force his expression back to solemnity. “God, you’re such a fucking nerd. Seriously, my _trousers?_”

“Oh yes, with great pleasure. The Marshal himself could not have stopped me.”

Newt huffed what might have been a reluctant chuckle. Hermann’s heart warmed at the sound.

But Newton didn’t look up from his hands and once the soft chuckle died, his expression didn’t lighten. “Maybe I was a good man, back then. But what if I changed after the Breach closed? A lot of people did. Maybe I saw how fucked the world was after we saved it, everyone ready to dive right back into killing each other the second someone bigger wasn’t trying to kill us and decided to do humanity’s job for them. We already fucked our planet, right? Maybe that is what a _good man_ would do, just put an end to the whole fucking mess.”

“You’re reaching,” Hermann said. “And if you’re trying to convince me that you were the villain all along, you’re going to have to do better than that, darling. I’ve failed undergraduates who provided better citations for their argument.”

“Oh yeah, what’s _your_ fucking source then, Professor Gottlieb?” 

“Dolphins.”

“The _fuck_?”

“The Mega Kaiju reaction would have burnt up our atmosphere, boiled our seas, and extinguished all life on Earth. I could _perhaps_, under some duress, imagine you as an extreme eco-terrorist bent on humanity's destruction, my dear, but it will take a little more effort to convince me you would deliberately turn the _entire_ world into a cinder. Even if you were to fall to utter nihilism and despair, you would find a way to spare the dolphins.”

“You know there’s other stuff in the ocean we should be protecting too, right? Goddamn ‘cute’ megafauna sucking up all the funding…” Newt muttered and Hermann shot him a knowing smile. Newt bristled at the sight. “Ok, maybe you’re right. Maybe next time I should focus on just wiping out the human population centers. Oh, wait, where have I heard that one before!”

"Now you're taking credit for the first Kaiju War? My, you have been busy." 

“Fine, ok, even if none of this was my fault,” Newt countered. “Even if, _if_, I did _everything_ humanly possible to stop the Precursors, never asked for it, never gave them an inch, and I was just the human fucking sock puppet with no control unlucky enough to get stuck with them, even _then_… Hermann, what if they come _back_?”

Hermann went still and saw beside him Newt staring blankly into the distance, chewing at his lip before he met Hermann’s gaze. “What if the Precursors come back for me, Hermann? What if I’m not really out?”

_He knows I’m here, he knows I’m here and he’s coming to get me, he knows I’m…_ Hermann closed his eyes. The day they Drifted that memory had been at the forefront of Newton’s mind. Rain on his skin. Fear crawling through his veins and the deafening crash of concrete and the shriek of steel as Otachi hunted him through the streets. 

What if they found Newton again? What if Hermann woke again to an empty bed and the scream of alarms as breaches opened across the world and monsters poured once more from the deep? “Then I will go to the ends of the Earth to bring you home again.”

“What if you can’t save me? What if you can only stop me?”

Hermann opened his eyes and looked at Newt. 

“Then I would stop you.”

Newton released a slow breath, and his shoulders dropped as the stiffness left his body and a look of relief softened his face. “I’m gonna hold you to that.”

Hermann reached out and took Newton’s hand, entwining their fingers, the pale skin of his wrist a stark and familiar contrast to the multi-hued tattoos on Newton’s.

Platitudes rose to his mind. _You won’t have to. They won’t come back. I’ll never lose you again._ Unhelpful. Unhelpful and untrue, they were men of science. Neither could be sure of what the future held and those words would be only for his own sake, not Newton’s. As unhelpful as stating the truth that if he were ever driven to circumstances where the only way to save the world was to end Newton’s life, that he would be close behind.

He brought Newton’s hand to his lips and kissed the back of it. "Shall we go back to bed? Or are there a few more dreadful hypotheticals you’d like to resolve before the sun comes up?” 

“You’re such an ass,” Newt rolled his eyes but his hand tightened around Hermann’s in return. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. I do hope you enjoyed and that, if you have a moment to spare, you could let me know what you thought of this piece :)


End file.
